Fade to Black
by Hezakai
Summary: Sometimes the will to live isn't enough, sometimes a reason to live is more important; but finding it in the wake of overwhelming truth can take everything a person has inside. Post SING, alternate storyline.


The sensation, the white-hot rush of pure energy through his skull that washed away everything else; it was overwhelming and oddly peaceful in that split second when all the burdens of life dropped away and the darkness blanketed his thoughts.

While he had never been one for lofty beliefs in things like eternal rest and the like it was such a nice idea and he had hoped, somewhere deep inside, that he would find that when he closed his eyes forever.

Which was why opening them again felt like such a sting of bitterness. 

The world was painted up in hues of pain; a headache, sore muscles, weary down to his bones, and Party Poison didn't even have the energy to give it all a proper cursing under his breath for good measure. 

"Rise and shine sleeping beauty, today is the first day of the rest of your life...and that's impressive for a dead man." The voice skated past him, in the very literal sense as the man who owned it darted to and fro around the table where Poison was lying prone and stiff.

Somehow he didn't expect his afterlife to look so much like a dusty garage and angels to look quite like Show Pony.

He expected at the very least some clouds and halos to be involved; that was the recollection he had of the idea from books long since gone once religion had become yet another dirty little secret BLI decided the world was a better place for not being corrupted by. 

And the only hint of smoke to reach his nose was the stall burnt oil of old car parts; all in all the afterlife wasn't much worse or any better than he thought it would be. 

Sitting up convinced him that he must have been alive, his lungs hurt too much to breathe for him to be in heaven and didn't hurt enough for that place to be hell; but how he was still among the living was a mystery even Poison had no way of unraveling.

He might have stood a chance if not for the fact that even lifting his head left a streak of ache like shoving his hand into the running engine of Kobra's bike. And since he felt so royally pissed off at the time Poison had the distinct comfort of knowing he couldn't have been a Drac; unless he was the new, improved, righteously irritated model. 

Either Show Pony had developed the ability to read minds or he must have been wearing his confusion on his dirty face during the internal debate over how he remained alive, because that voice just kept breaking up his thoughts with useful information. "You lucked out, if you can call it that; whoever tried to ghost you must not have been running on full juice; can't imagine they were trying on purpose to just stun you." 

"The others? Grace? How did I get here?" The words fell out of his dry mouth in a rush of voice too raspy to be his own and Poison felt his jaw aching with the effort. 

"Grace is safe and sound; me and Doctor D have been seeing to that personally, everybody else is in more or less one piece. Worried about Kobra a few days there but he pulled through; we're all still one big, happy family and you guys are the luckiest bunch of suicidal psychopaths I've ever seen.

Now lie back down, we still don't know what those beams did to the inside of your skull and no use taking chances on any of that slick stuff inside your head leaking out through your ears."

Show Pony was simply a blur of motion as Poison's eyes went in and out of focus; it was too much to sort out through the mental fog so he just sank back down to wait and hope when he woke the next time the world made more sense. 

And it did, gradually, over the course of two weeks Poison found himself reunited with his makeshift family, and Pony hadn't been lying about them all looking like hell; Fun Ghoul scurried around with a limp that he tried to hide and Kobra Kid had coughing fits that made everyone around him cringe. Jet Star barely showed it; whatever affects the wounds had on him, other than keeping to himself with a distant, focused sort of silence that was extreme even for the least talkative of their little group.

A few more scars to carry was just the way life worked in the Zones, and the details of just how it was that they all ended back up in the safekeeping of Doctor D lost their importance.

Though, to his credit, Kobra did spend more time now and then fixing the little things that Show Pony lamented over being broken when he had some time to spare, everything came in terms of trades along the outskirts, even gratitude. 

Poison was so glad to have everyone back that for a while he ignored everything else, his own failing memory and fits of confusion included; life in the Zones was still a fight to survive and that wasn't going to take any pity on them, or really give them time to heal those aches. 

The one that dug under Poison's skin the most was the failure; Grace was back and that was a victory but the bigger, bad BLI still stood a towering force of black and white infecting Battery City. The building had not fallen, Korse had not died, and it had only grown far worse; now not a night went by that the Dracs didn't crawl the edges of the Zones with intent not to capture so much as kill. 

The game had become more dire, and Poison knew it was because of their actions. 

In all his intentions and longing to change the world not once had Poison's pride let him accept that he might just change it for the worse rather than the better. 

He only thought about it when he was alone, when he was on watch at night, looking up at the hazy sky devoid of stars and feeling the gritty sand rubbing at his raw face every time the dead breeze rose barely enough to shift; those were the moments when Poison entertained the doubt he had only begun to finally feel.

But the problem with being alone, even in the Zones, was that there was no such thing as privacy. 

"I'd sell my left kidney for a drink right now."

The voice and the groan that accompanied it while the man flopped down in the sand next to him both belonged to Ghoul, it was too distinct to be anyone else and too thick in those complaints to be very serious.

"Hell, I'd sell your left kidney too," Ghoul added with a stretch that cracked bones back into proper places and left him sitting there with shoulders hanging low.

"Interrupting your communing with the universe?" 

"Trying to figure out why we still do it." Poison felt like a traitor for the words but they came of their own accord; honest and refusing to be brushed aside. 

Ghoul had a far less introspective response however, but that was just his style. "Shit." 

Fun Ghoul, for all his love of a little humor to lighten the load and the occasional snide remark to amuse himself with, took some things deathly serious. These things included, in roughly order of importance; staying alive, depending on their fearless leader, and hunting down all the good little toys to trade for shiny things while they roamed the Zones.

So anything that put those important ideas at risk made him very uncomfortable and had to be addressed quickly, and fixed.

"Because we're super heroes, we already came back from the dead." 

But when the humor didn't work Ghoul sighed and scrubbed the knee of his torn jeans with his palm before he spoke again with less vigor in his voice; "Because somebody has to."

"There are more of them every day now, running to the Zones, leaving the city; kids...yeah, but whole families and everybody else, even soldiers. We're getting close to winning, aren't we?"

But when Ghoul offered it Poison found himself without an answer to that question; all his boisterous claims felt weak and tasted like dust across his lips. 

"Even if we do, what do we have left?" 

"Nothing, fuck man...everybody knows that, even Gracie knows the future is first-rate screwed over; but whatever, I still plan to be here for it." Ghoul shrugged and scratched at his knee; a habit he had picked up ever since saving Grace, what passed for doctors around the Zones said it was something to do with his spine being fried in some spot that made his leg weak and prone to randomly cramp up but Ghoul didn't care about the details as much as he took it as an annoyance overall.

They used to shoot lame horses, or so he had been told. 

Lately Ghoul had been troubled by the change he saw in his best friend, maybe it was some fault of that blast to the head or maybe it was just coming back to the Zones after thinking you were dead, he couldn't figure out what had happened exactly to Poison, but he didn't like it any more than he liked having to haul himself up in the morning and stumble around until he was warm enough to shake off the pins and needles sensation.

But that burden he could handle, there was no life of freedom anymore without a fight to go with it and some aches to shoulder; it was a fair trade for being able to know who he was. 

And Ghoul was entirely sure Poison had always known not only who he was but who they all were, and that was why they followed him; something in the man screamed in protest from the start when all of them were still whispering about it under their breath.

Their leader was the one with the plan, the one with the ideas and the one with the guts to carry them out; they followed him because their faith was absolute in Poison and in what he thought needed to change in the world.

Seeing that waver for the first time was enough to make Ghoul feel a chill that could have broken up the heat in his blood if not for the air around them already doing a fair job of it; the crushing blow none of them could face might have become a real threat if Poison had lost the faith they all might as well start popping pills and or digging their graves, and Ghoul has been dead once already in the past month so neither option sounds very shiny. 

"Don't you start this," he warned in a voice stronger than he felt and heavy with more desperation than hope; "It's no time to start bleeding black and white while the rest of us are still counting on the color."

Ghoul wanted to grab Poison and shake the man until he could rattle some sense back into his skull; wants to force the doubt away and take apart all the questions the way he untangles wires and bits of metal when he works on the bike or the car with Kobra. 

The machines they painted in colors to match their need for it, to give their convictions a solid place to reside, if only dripping those bright hues back into Poison's weary mind were that simple Ghoul would have run off that very instant to hunt down whatever shade of red or blue or green it required. 

Silence; neither of them said anything and the sting in the air from the sand wasn't distracting enough, night was forever ebony-dark and empty in the Zones if a person was lucky. 

"I brought you all into this," the final words of a broken man perhaps, but Poison doesn't feel the pain that should come with them. 

"We brought ourselves into this," Ghoul countered until one glance from the man beside him made him sigh and shrug with the weight of some truths, "Kobra doesn't count, you brought him but he was looking for a way out in the first place; if you hadn't brought him then he would have been gone on his own before long."

The choices they had all made had never been questioned, it was an unspoken rule of the Zones; no man had the right to ask for the past of another or their motives. It was how they each survived knowing the difference between who they were and who they had to be.

And they had each come to Zones of their own accord; Poison to be a leader and Kobra following at first before he quickly found that voice of his own, Jet to escape the knowledge of his own history and himself, well, Ghoul had needed to want to live again and it was just that simple. 

"It's not the time to give up," Ghoul added after another endless moment; but by then he wasn't certain if Poison was even listening anymore.


End file.
